Herbst, Josephine (Frey) (1892–1969)

US writer. In 1933 she published Pity is Not Enough, the first volume of her trilogy based on her own family's history from the Civil War to the Great Depression. During the 1930s, the world's economic, political, and social problems led her to writing journalism and to identifying with radical views and circles. Herbst went to Spain briefly in 1937 to report on the civil war there, and back in the USA she was on the fringes of the Communist Party. In 1942 she was fired from a government job because of her leftist associations.

Herbst was born in Sioux City, Iowa. From a poor family, she worked at odd jobs as she went from college to college, finally gaining her BA at the University of California, Berkeley (1918). She moved to New York City and fell in with the literary set there. Herbst had an affair with the dramatist Maxwell Anderson, and then went off to Berlin and Paris to write. She returned to the USA in 1924 with the writer, John Hermann, whom she married; they settled with in a farmhouse in Erwinna, Pennsylvania. The divorced 1940, and initially in the post-war years she became a near recluse in her Erwinna home. As she resumed her writing, however, she gained a new circle of admirers.